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miller60 writes "Iceland is poised for the completion of its first major international data center project, after years of marketing itself as a potential data center mecca. Iceland offers an ample supply of geothermal energy and an ideal environment for fresh air cooling, but its ambitions were slowed by the global financial collapse. But now the huge UK charity Wellcome Trust has provided funding to complete a new data center in a former NATO facility in Keflavik."

it's in the process of being changed. Iceland has really been fucked over by the crisis. People are mad. Country small, politicians agile and everybody desperate... expect some REAL CHANGE you insensitive americans.

It seems like the regions of the world where electricity-hungry aluminum production has centered would do well with data centers. Quebec is also endowed with plentiful hydroelectric electricity, ample cooling capacity, local expertise, and most importantly, proximity to large markets. I almost wonder why i don't hear more about data center hosting in Quebec, given the natural advantages

By the way, does anyone know if there was a plan to build an aluminum smelter in Iceland, if it ever ended up being built, and if the smelter is currently in production if it was built? Oddly enough, even a single reasonably sized aluminum smelter using the geothermal power available in Iceland would be much more profitable, directly employ far more people, and would produce far more economic activity locally in Iceland than a rinky-dink data center on an old NATO base.

The aforementioned hydroelectric energy and cold environment is usually not very near major cities.

I'm not arguing with you - in fact, I agree, datacenters in remote areas that are suitable to them tend to be cheaper to run (cheaper land tax) and more secure, since someone visiting it who wasn't supposed to be there would be noticed fairly quickly.

It seems there's some kind of strange law that datacenters have to be located in or near major cities. I have no idea why, since major cities are usually in

Of course, that depends a lot on where you start from. From the UK, ping to Slashdot.org is 120ms, ping to www.icetourist.is is 70ms. From anywhere in the EU, ping times from Iceland will be lower than ping times to the USA.

And, for another data point, ping from my server in Texas is 66ms to Slashdot, 188ms to www.icetourist.is. Ping from here to there is 175ms. So, somewhat strangely, it's further from your US customers than a data center in the UK would be, but it's about as close to people in the EU as Slashdot is to people in the US.

It'd be interesting if we saw Iceland make its laws more lax and turning it into the Singapore of Europe - i.e. the place where everyone would have their proxy server or seedbox hosted to cover their tracks and avoid ugly baseball-inspired laws...

Actually no. Since it sits between Europe and North America, its a good place for a site or service that has users from both continents. You most likely already use sites that reside in Europe and we use sites that reside in US (like slashdot) anyway - its the middle ground.

From what I understand, it's really pretty good. A lot of the transatlantic bandwidth goes up and over, rather than straight across underwater. It helps to have repeaters occasionally, and it's nice if you can service them with a quick drive, rather than a submarine dive.:) It's suppose to make for a very nice place to have service, with fast pipes pointing towards the Northeast US and Western Europe.

In an ideal world, if you had to locate for customers in both the US and Europe, it would be a great place. I know routing doesn't always cooperate as well as you'd like though.

Way back when, I had servers in New York, and in Germany (among other places). Many European customers complained about the speeds to the German datacenter. Some of those were even in the same city in Germany as our equipment. The ones that sent me traceroutes showed that they were being routed from Germany to New York, and then back to Germany. Needless to say, the latency on that was a nightmare. In the end, we moved all of our European traffic to New York, and we started getting thank you notes from all over Europe. We didn't announce what we did, but they could tell the difference in speed. Most of the customers assumed that we simply changed the operation in Europe. They were completely unaware that they were being served out of New York. Well, except the few who knew enough to run a traceroute.:)

So, the Iceland datacenters may be a wonderful thing, or they may be a project that dies in it's infancy.

I know a lot of folks like having their servers within reach. That is, somewhere they can drive to from their home or office in a reasonable amount of time. I've seen with customers all over. Just because they live in god forsaken (and bandwidth limited) nowhere, they'll still host locally.

I actually feel real bad for them. Have you ever monitored large amounts of traffic? The majority is so boring, you wouldn't even want to see it.:) Oh look, someone just updated their MySpace profile. "Lolz, I my kitty jest jumped off me bed! Dat wuz da bomb." [warning: keyword "bomb"] {sigh}

A call center that I worked at before I became a developer (Convergys) just closed in my old hometown. My warning to Iceland is to be cautious: there is no loyalty in the call center industry. Sure this is good now and will help the economy but a lot of good it will do in the long run if they close down in four years.

Wikileaks has a proposal to get a bunch of different free-speech, safe-harbor, journalist-protection style legislation through Iceland so as to both spur this kind of development, as well as provide a political safe-haven for data. Apparently it has caught on pretty well locally, and with a small population it's not particularly difficult to get such legislation passed on short notice.

Their banking problems have nothing to do with their local economy. Capital has already been flooding into Iceland. These datacenters are chicken feed compared to Alcoa moving their aluminum smelters to the island.

They are selling themselves as the clean energy capital of the world and doing a pretty good job of it. I'm pretty sure the locals want a slice of Alcoa pie in the form of tax.

Umm, I'm a bit confused on the local benefits to being a tax haven for both tax cheats and "legitimate" uses, perhaps you could help me. Even though cash might flow into a location that might act as a tax haven assuming it has a currency with a history of stability, which Iceland's currency does not currently, please explain why it follows that being a tax haven is a good thing. Tax cheats and tax avoiders really only want to put there money where their home country will not tax it, they really don't care

"The sums that the Icelandic government was responsible for legally (approx 20k euros per account holder) was paid back in 2008."

The money needed to pay up this guarantee was forked over by the UK and NL governments, not by Iceland. This was done in the form of a loan to the Icelandic government and it's this money both governments are claiming back.

This has been on the cards for about two years now. Construction at the site stopped last month because politicians wouldn't dare go on with the project because of public opposition. One of the top stakeholders in Verne Global is one Bjorgolfur Thor Bjorgolfsson, former owner of failed bank Landsbanki, whose high-interest Icesave savings accounts failed spectacularly and have kicked off the biggest firestorm in the republics' short history.
Also, the bandwidth is not a problem.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenland_Connect [wikipedia.org] (goes to US/CANADA)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DANICE [wikipedia.org] (goes to EU)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FARICE-1 [wikipedia.org] (goes to EU)
These are the fiber cables we have. As you can read, we have lots of unlit fiber there.

I, for one, prefer my datacenters be as far as possible away from a scared-to-death, self-centered, 1984-style, patriotic, homeland-secured government that just got a big one in the nuts on september 11th.

Especially since Iceland is essentially bankrupt. Projects like this will help get its economy on the way to recovery, and hopefully accomplish great things for the infrastructure of the internet as well. Particularly if the safe-harbor legislation gets... through...

According to the Wikileaks 1.0 presentation [youtube.com] Iceland could pass a bill which will provide a last resort for information which is suppressed in other European countries (currently on the Wikileaks [wikileaks.org] website with a call for donations).

Could pass, isn't good enough. If they do pass such a bill,
Iceland might offer a useful data center for boardline data
(which types?), but I doubt that alone would make it
worthwhile offer a transnational data center. For most
companies, all they need, is good response to service
the equipment they Co-locate they, and easy-access.
Iceland is so remote that access would almost be
only by the internet, and not physical. I think Iceland
will have to grow they're own local internet companies
to get they data c

The Wellcome Trust are a huge biomedical research charity. I would imagine that they are looking for processing power(think folding@home type projects) rather than the ability to serve up millions of webpages. If so bandwidth will be less of a concern than cheap reliable power and cooling. Iceland is looking to join the European Union so their Data Protection legislation is probably similar to rest of the EU's.

Dear Iceland, "your government" has allowed institutions in your nation (and elsewhere) to claim that "debt is output" and that speculation constitutes GDP. That's a willful, knowing lie.Nobody should trust the stability of Iceland at all let alone the ability to keep data safe and keep it available through emergencies, "your government" is already milking you for this.

I suspect that Iceland will provide a first rate service. Their climate makes indoor activities and studies much more of a good idea than Miami Beach. It is somewhat like Harvard being in Boston. So much of the year is too cold to do much anything other than study.

I hope that this datacenters can take earthquakes, as they are building them on top of active seismic zone on the Reykjanes. But then there is also the volcano problem and the ash that can happen when a volcano eruption is taking place.

Do you have a need for datacenters? We do and I frankly could care less if our datacenters are located in the US and Iceland is an attractive location for the reason mentioned in the article. Geothermal power is plentiful and the climate keeps the cooling costs down, but there are some other factors to consider. Bandwidth is one, another is how much extra does it cost to design a facility to be more resistant to earthquakes as the vulcanization that offers those benefits of abundant geothermal power also means there is seismic instability.

There are other factors as well. Iceland has a small population. Do they have the local expertise? If not, how hard is it to get residency permits for foreign workers. What are the other associated tax laws and other legal differences in the area. Do they have different data laws than here in the US? Do these costs off set the energy cost savings?

I've been to Iceland a couple times to visit friends and like it there. They are used to constructing buildings to withstand earthquakes and they have an educated work force and middle of the rung when it comes to tax and other expenses. Our only huge concern I know was looking at the size of the population and wondering how many people in the entire country are familiar with Teradata. If not, we'd need to relocate a couple people at least for 3 - 5 years.

Right now? If you're looking to business as anything other than a bank/investment firm, white slavery operation or kiddie porn ring in Iceland, the answer to just about any request is going to be 'yes'. It's a great time for businesses to extract concessions from Iceland's govt.

"Bandwidth is one, another is how much extra does it cost to design a facility to be more resistant to earthquakes as the vulcanization that offers those benefits of abundant geothermal power also means there is seismic instability."
While a perfectly legitimate concern, bandwidth is not a problem. Neither is the seismic activity. Any serious seismic activity is well mapped out and building for it hasn't been a problem since we crawled out of the caves (which admittedly was only around 1900). In my opinion, the earthquakes are outright fun, and we know well where the earthquake danger zones are. Start worrying if you hear that they want to build it around Selfoss.;)
I'm born raised in Iceland but currently live in Canada and I've spent a year in Finland, and I can absolutely, positively guarantee you that the tech guru population per capita in Iceland is drastically higher than in either one of those. Even though the Finns are generally geeks... and I mean that in a good way obviously. Frankly, I think lack of geek skills in Iceland are not a problem for this particular project, and besides, the worst case scenario is that it won't be as monstrously huge as otherwise.
Of course I'm biased, I can only promise you that I'd tell you if I thought it were a problem.
I suppose the biggest problem would be the controversy over the energy it would require. Even though we are extremely lucky for how cheap electricity is in Iceland, there is also the counter-view that nature is to be preserved and therefore not exploited... even though it's the most nature-friendly way of producing electricity imaginable... okay, let's not get into politics.;)
Honestly, I think that would be the biggest problem. Dealing with the politics.

Also I have to add... foreign money is worth a lot in Iceland now, and will for quite a while (decades). It's one of the most serious economic problems facing Iceland, the low value of the currency. It's terrible for the Icelandic population of course, but it means that labour is dirt cheap if you have foreign currency. Odds are you'd get much better bang for the buck.

I'm born raised in Iceland but currently live in Canada and I've spent a year in Finland, and I can absolutely, positively guarantee you that the tech guru population per capita in Iceland is drastically higher than in either one of those. Even though the Finns are generally geeks... and I mean that in a good way obviously.

As a Finnish geek... I don't know whether to feel insulted or flattered.